Why Fiction (still) Matters
Working in digital media in New York City, a.k.a. Silicon Alley, where so many of us work in media, tech and advertising, the latest novel out by David Eggers, The Circle, hit close to home. Just twenty pages in, the voice rang so eerily true to my ears I thought, “Did he read our emails?” From A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to What is the What, Eggers has explored complex social issues with his trademark blend of due respect for weighty subject matter and winking satire that calls us to stop drinking the kool aid long enough to consider another perspective. In The Circle, Eggers takes on the issue of privacy, playing along that line we dance along with every new technology launch. We think, “Wow, so cool. Or maybe it’s creepy?” that a bracelet now measures every step we take. It isn’t long before Eggers throws us headlong down the dystopian rabbit hole, taking seemingly innocuous technologies and beliefs to extreme ends, playing out the relational and societal ramifications all along the way.
The privacy debate has been raging for some time, but the focus of the conversation launched by Edward Snowden has been on what happens to our data, whether or not we own it, who can see it, and how and under what circumstances the government may use this data to protect its interests in the world. Eggers’ novel acknowledges that this data exists as a permanent record, but its characters for the most part buy in to the idea, as many of us do today, that as long as it helps us manage our health, saves us time, or delivers an improved experience, the benefits outweigh the risks. What I found much more interesting than the de rigueur privacy debate was the epistemological questions he raises--what and how much can we know about life and about each other?
If we could perfectly democratize all the world's information (which the internet, search, and social platforms have nearly achieved), would it possible to know, for example, how good you are in bed? You can ask, but as we see with one unfortunate fellow in the book, that knowledge depends upon your partner's honesty. Can you know how it feels to kayak the San Francisco Bay by looking at someone else's photos and video? You may think you know, but is that knowledge the same as the experience itself? Clearly it's not. Would you want to know about your parents' sex life? For the novel's protagonist, as for most of us, the answer is not especially, no.
What Eggers is getting us to consider is that knowledge is not the same as experience. And when it comes to knowing people, all the data in the world cannot tell you what's in a person's heart and mind, what they will choose to reveal and what they will keep to themselves, when they will tell the truth and when they will lie, when they will be willing to be vulnerable and when they will run and hide. We rely on unmeasurable qualities like character and morality to tell us how we can expect others to behave, but if we are honest, do we ever really know the potential for good and evil inside of ourselves not to mention our neighbors? These choices are at the core of human agency--our control over our selves is a pillar of human dignity, mental health, and healthy relationships. And it’s one of the last frontiers of mystery in a world where we can now see our sleep cycles on a chart on our phones when we wake up in the morning. I hope we will continue to choose the glorious and sometimes scary mystery of real relationships over the safe isolation of digital knowledge.
Fittingly, this very question of what can be known is one of the reasons I read fiction—because I believe an extended “what if” conversation can accomplish what other media cannot. I believe fiction can help us to conclusions that wouldn’t be nearly as plausible or as interesting if they were delivered to us via Twitter or in an op-ed in the Times. Sometimes after the suspension of disbelief we come to new beliefs having seen an argument to its end. This sometimes takes time. Like maybe the hours it takes to read a book. Can we devote that much time? If the issue is important enough I think we must. These issues are simply too complex to be delivered in a sound bite, which means they will never be adequately explored in the news. Even long form journalism cannot report on conjecture, on “what if’s.”
This is why we need the arts. We need our greatest practitioners to test the conclusions of the stories we’ve just begun to tell, to envision alternative futures, to warn and to hope in equal measure, to build little towers from which they can circle a light to illuminate the rocks along the shore.
